Aidan Salzmann is a co-founder at Stride Labs, the company that created the Stride blockchain. He has a background in product and engineering, working as a researcher and product engineer before switching to building liquid staking for Cosmos and Stride Labs.

Education

He holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, completing various modules in data systems, computer programs, and more. He a lso did a semester at the University of Copenhagen. He speaks German and English.^[2]

Career

Salzmann started as a researcher and developer at Virtual Reality at Berkeley, a community of Berkeley students that served to increase public awareness of virtual reality. He met his Stride Labs co-founder, Riley Edmunds, here. In 2018, he worked a summer at Veo Technologies as a Machine Learning Engineer in Denmark. He moved on to his first full-time job at Humu, for product and engineering. He was the primary engineer for Manager Effectiveness, one of its 3 core products. He worked here from 2019 to 2021.^[2]

Stride Labs

He co-founded Stride Labs in March 2022 and has been working there for two years up to the present.^[3] Its main product is the Stride blockchain which provides liquidity for staked tokens. It is part of the Cosmos interchain ecosystem. Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains that can scale and interoperate with one another. Cosmos is built on a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. It uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, in which validators rather than miners validate transactions and verify the accuracy of new blocks.^[4]

In October 2023, Salzmann made a proposal that the Cosmos Hub  will provision the ATOM for the conversion and ensure that all STRD is converted to ATOM. Following this switch, in the current draft of the proposal ATOM will be the only governance token for Stride protocol, and all Stride rewards — $700,000 annualized — will be reallocated to ATOM stakers.

“From Stride’s perspective, this would be a good idea because it would greatly increase the decentralization of Stride protocol, which should in turn increase confidence and lead to more liquid staking. Cosmos Hub will also benefit from the merge, as the Stride team can be an independent development team part of the Cosmos Hub, making it more decentralized and removing any anxieties around misaligned governance. - Aidan Salzmann^[1]

Stride can be used to liquid stake one's tokens from any Cosmos chain, earning both staking and DeFi yields from across the Cosmos IBC ecosystem. Users can receive staked tokens immediately when the liquid stake, and rewards will be accumulated in real time to staked token holders. These staked tokens can be freely traded, and can be redeemed with Stride at any time to receive back native tokens plus staking rewards. Currently, Stride supports liquid staking for: Cosmos Hub (stATOM), Osmosis (stOSMO), Injective (stINJ), Stargaze (stSTARS), Evmos (stEVMOS), Terra 2 (stLUNA), Umee (stUMEE), Juno (stJUNO), Comdex (stCMDX), Sommelier (stSOMM).^[4]